Barack Obama campaigned as a change-the-system outsider, but he has governed as a work-the-system insider. There’s no shame in that. But that’s what made his comment about how change doesn’t happen from the inside so annoying. Obama made his inside strategy clear immediately after his election when he announced that his chief of staff would be Rahm Emanuel, the ultimate get-it-done dealmaker, the antithesis of postpartisan statesmanship. In 2011, I asked Emanuel what he thought of Obama’s lofty rhetoric about changing Washington in 2008.

“Look, I don’t really know,” he said with a smirk. “I come from Chicago.”

So does Obama, and while he’s in some ways an anti-Emanuel — conciliatory rather than confrontational, cool rather than volcanic — he knew he needed an Emanuel to move his agenda, because bills that don’t pass Congress don’t make change. In my new book, The New New Deal, I tell the story of how Emanuel drove Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package through Capitol Hill, and it’s not a pretty story. It involved a lot of screaming and naughty words, plus a few unsavory deals. But by the time Emanuel was done calling House Appropriations Chairman David Obey a bleep and the Blue Dog Democrats motherbleeps and then-Republican Senator Arlen Specter a bleeping bleep, he and Vice President Joe Biden managed to round up the votes to pass the bill.

That stimulus bill was all about change. It poured $90 billion into clean energy when we were spending just a few billion a year, launching a quiet green revolution; it provided a down payment on health reform that will drag our pen-and-paper medical system into the digital age. It also included Race to the Top, the most ambitious federal education reform in decades; the largest infrastructure investments since Eisenhower, including a new high-speed rail initiative; the largest middle-class tax cuts since Reagan; the largest onetime research investments ever; and much more. It even helped change Washington — not politically, but bureaucratically, with unprecedented transparency and oversight, and by distributing federal dollars through competition rather than check-the-box entitlement grants. Oh, and the stimulus also helped prevent a depression. It is one of the most important and least understood pieces of legislation in history.

But the change it produced did not come from outside Washington. During an economic emergency, it made sense to focus more on changing the country than changing the capital. And Obama played a similar inside game to pass Obamacare, because he needed 60 votes in the Senate, and again to pass Wall Street reform; that quest for 60 has defined the arc of his presidency, forcing him to align his ambitions with the whims of a few swing Senators. But while he may not have kept his promises to change American politics, he has kept his promises to change America’s policies. His by-any-means-necessary approach has sometimes taken a political toll, producing backroom deals like the infamous “Cornhusker kickback,” but it’s gotten a lot done. It has advanced his agenda. It is changing lives. As Seth Meyers joked on Saturday Night Live: “We can’t change it. That’s why we sent you!”

Clearly, though, Obama feels embarrassed about the gap between his lofty campaign rhetoric and his down-and-dirty legislative strategy. “Come on, man, he was pure!” Emanuel cackled during our interview. “It was his chief of staff who was the whore!” It’s hard to imagine that Obama actually believes that, but even if he doesn’t, it’s disappointing to see him pretend that the inside game can’t produce change.

Which is the more redistributionist of our two parties? In recent decades, as Republicans have devoted themselves with laser-like intensity to redistributing America’s wealth and income upward, the evidence suggests the answer is the GOP.

The most obvious way that Republicans have robbed from the middle to give to the rich has been the changes they wrought in the tax code — reducing income taxes for the wealthy in the Reagan and George W. Bush tax cuts, and cutting the tax rate on capital gains to less than half the rate on the top income of upper-middle-class employees.

The less widely understood way that Republicans have helped redistribute wealth to the already wealthy is by changing the rules. Markets don’t function without rules, and the rules that Republican policymakers have made since Ronald Reagan became president have consistently depressed the share of the nation’s income that the middle class can claim.

Mitt Romney, in a "60 Minutes" interview, stated he would give the middle-class tax savings by providing cuts to Dividend Taxes, Capital Gains Tax and the Minimum Tax. The actual truth is that those cuts would really benefit the wealthy, especially like Romney himself, and they would offer very little to the middle-class who don't have those large investments and likely most of what they do have would already be in tax advantaged 401ks. Again the subterfuge is boldly given to con the majority while concentrating on serving only "the money". This is totally consistent and typical of the Republican tactics and again demonstrates why they can't be trusted or ever counted on to represent the majority - everything they say is just an insulting con while they concentrate on serving only the few and their own political ambitions.

Doesn't it seem funny the one thing Obama promised, transparency, did not happen during his entire time in office to date? Why is that Mr Grumwald?

We were promised C-Span cameras to expose all the sausage making in Washington, but we did not get even one video at all. Why is that Mr Grumwald?

If you want to break Washington of back room deals, you must expose the sausage making to the public. To put people on record in videos in order to stop all the corruption and deal making. This one act would stop all the crazy inside Washington deals. Obama threatened it, but he totally failed at implementation. Yet another reason he should not be re-elected in November.

We were promised C-Span cameras to expose all the sausage making in Washington, but we did not get even one video at all...

Beginning June 17, 2009, and extending through September 14, 2009, three Democratic and three Republican Senate Finance Committee Members met for a series of 31 meetings to discuss the development of a health care reform bill. Over the course of the next three months, this group, Senators Max Baucus (D-Montana), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Kent Conrad (D-North Dakota), Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), Jeff Bingaman (D-New Mexico), and Mike Enzi (R-Wyoming), met for more than 60 hours, and the principles that they discussed became the foundation of the Senate's health care reform bill.[136] The meetings were held in public and broadcast by C-SPAN and can be seen on the C-SPAN web site[137] or at the Committee's own web site.[138] During the August 2009 congressional recess, many members went back to their districts and entertained town hall meetings to solicit public opinion on the proposals. During the summer recess, the Tea Party movement organized protests and many conservative groups and individuals targeted congressional town hall meetings to voice their opposition to the proposed reform bills.[134][139]

Away from the televised meetings, the legislation became a "bonanza" for lobbyists,[140][141] including secret deals that were initially denied but subsequently confirmed.[142][143] The Sunlight Foundation documented many of the reported ties between "the healthcare lobbyist complex" and politicians in both major parties.[144]

Except that it hasn't worked. Since the Bush Tax cuts, there aren't any more jobs. It's fair that the rich don't have to pay as much tax as everyone else. And the GOP is wondering why this guy is losing?

The "court eunuchs of the American media" spare no effort to cover for Obama.

"CBS Doesn't Air Obama Admitting Mistakes in Campaign Ads"

'Tonight, CBS aired a 60 Minutes interview with President Obama. But curiously enough, the news magazine show did not air a clip of Obama admitting to interviewer Steve Kroft that some of his campaign ads contain mistakes and that some even "go overboard." '

Every president makes changes from the inside but when some changes are hard to make they would rather be on the outside. But I think Obama was trying to send a message to supporters to vote for congressmen who will work with him.

You would be correct. When you have your President, Vice President and Secretary of State feeding you lies and half truths it is hard no to. Having said that I will agree that Afganistan was a war of necessity. Iraq however was very much a war of choice. And neither war was paid for. In my memory I can't remember any other time that America was at war and cutting taxes at the same time.